It has long been desired in the prior art to provide a previewer whereby the user could preview an article to be worn, such as an article of clothing, without physically trying one the article or a large plurality of such articles, before selecting a desired article.
One early attempt is disclosed in Bourdier, et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,507,570, granted Apr. 21, 1970 wherein an optical composite image was provided. That system was limited to a fixed physical position of the user and the number of pre-recorded article views was extremely limited. A more recent improvement is the system of Maloomian, U.S. Pat. No. 4,261,012, granted Apr. 7, 1981, wherein a series of model posed images are video stored and a video composite image with the viewer's image is rendered on a television monitor. The Maloomian system is limited to the particular number and particular poses that have been pre-recorded, and further requires substantial model or posing time for inputting the system.
Therefore, such prior art systems were costly to utilize and severely limited in the scope of appearances available to the viewer, and the composite viewed images were static in nature.
It was also known in the prior art to provide a computer image generated display image and superimposing another image thereon such as is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,617,630 granted Nov. 2, 1971 Reiffel; U.S. Pat. No. 4,246,605 granted Jan. 20, 1981 La Russa; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,255,766 granted Mar. 10, 1981 to Matsuda, et al.
Now there is provided by the present invention a previewer wherein the user can dynamicaly preview an article or a plurality of articles in a dynamic viewing mode.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a novel previewer with dynamic as well as static previewing of an article in varying positions or poses.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a previewer as aforesaid in which one or several articles may be alternatively or simultaneously previewed.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a previewer as aforesaid in which the need for pre-recording modelled images is minimized or eliminated.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a system as aforesaid in which the user set up time is minimized.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a system in which the user image and the article images are dynamically moving in synchronization during the previewing.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a previewer which is readily usable by the viewer and in which the viewer can leisurely select articles and combination of articles for previewing.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a previewer whereby the user can preview various pairs of eyeglasses as they would appear when worn by the user, while the user is wearing his or her own prescription eyeglasses.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a previewer as immediately aforesaid which eliminates the need to try on pairs of eyeglasses without lenses or with non-prescription lenses, whereby the user is unable to fully and comfortably view the eyeglasses being previewed.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a previewer in which the user can make alterations to the image of the articles dynamically, and can customize the article to the user image.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a previewer in which the user can see himself or herself with a newly designed article, such as an on the spot designed hairdo.